F My Life by Valette, Passgalia, and Guedj

There are times when my pledge to turn every book I read into an Antick Musings post is particularly silly: today is one of those times. The current book is F My Life, the print manifestation of a once-zeitgeisty website of sad, amusing and Schadenfreude-ian real life stories, and it is the thing that it is and no more than that.

So, since I work by day as a marketer, I will do the rest of this review in quick, zippy, impactful bullet points!

• F My Life is edited by the three French creators of the site: Maxime Valette, Guillaume Passaglia, and Didier Guedj
• The site launched in 2008 as Vie de Merde, and the book followed the next year
• The book contains illustrations by Marie "Missbean" Levesque
• Like the site, the book is all user-contributed
• It's divided into six chapters with vague themes about aspects of life
• All of the stories are embarrassing, humiliating, soul-destroying, or worse
• But none of the stories happened to you, so you can enjoy them!

Reading the book of a website is an odd thing at the best of times, with only a few major reasons (to support the creators, to have something easier to read in the john, etc.). When the site is full of such short content to begin with, it feels even odder. But, if you like stories of woe happening to other people, this is a great compendium of them.